Determinants of Social Media Marketing Adoption among Smes: A Conceptual Framework

In recent times, many small and medium-sized business firms have embraced different avenues of social networking sites precisely in their business communication model, which has triggered an intensive transformation in business firms’ marketing dynamics. Acceptance, adoption, and leverage of social media (SM) marketing has become a common marketing practice tool for business firms and this new model of marketing tool extends an unexplored and new opportunity for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to integrate social media platform into their daily marketing activities. This scenario calls for an in-depth research study towards the marketing researchers to examine the impact of SM marketing on the business and marketing performance of SME firms. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to review relevant literature to determine what group of factors might have an impact on the SMEs’ decision to accept and adopt SM marketing into their organizational process. The proposed topic of this current paper offers future research studies a holistic conceptual framework of SM marketing adoption among SMEs, which is still not fully established in the existing literature. Moreover, the paper also extends a useful means to investigate the types of researches which need to be studied and investigated to facilitate empirical evidence based on additional research advancement in the domain of SM marketing.